Gehenna Palestynczykow

Voices

01/26/08

Breakout from Ghetto Gaza

Israel Shamir

They went out, risked their lives, rushed the army, overturned the fence, strode the barbed wire, wiped out the border between two states, committed so many heroic acts, worthy of great warriors, suffering casualties -- and when they were through, they went to shop and bought bread for their children. This gave a lie to the image of Palestinians that the Jews had tried to plant in world conscience: that of wild violent fanatics bent on rampage. Instead, the guys broke out of jail and bought bread. Meaning, they were kept hungry by their Jewish overlords. A stronger picture will not come soon from the Middle East than that of these family men carrying bread back home.

They are so normal, these Gaza, like you and me – they carry out their normal lives, they work in a bank or a garage -- but they get full medieval treatment. First, they were dispossessed and corralled into Gaza, then they were treated like even dogs should not be treated; they were not allowed to travel by a highway if the road is used by a Jew, they were not permitted to see their immediate family living only a mile away. And then, this siege. No food, nothing to feed the children with. No future, either, with Israel as the neighbour. They suffer for only one crime: they are not Jews, though, ironically, many of them are descendent of Jews, some with famous Jewish family names, who embraced Christ or the Prophet.

They were supposed to suffer quietly, but the Gazans have a lot of dignity. They voted for Hamas against the will of Israel and America, and they expelled the collaborationist gang of Dahlan. Now, they have rushed the fence, and that was a good example for all of us: nothing can be done within the legal limits our enemies had enforced. There is a need for the push that is called Revolution.

When the brave Gazans walked back, loaded with their lucky catch, with bread and rice, with salt and blankets, with vegetables and lambs, the Jews were decidedly unhappy. The natives will forget that we are like God unto them; we provide and we punish, we feed and we starve. Instead of accepting our doom, they took their fate in their hands. With bread and rice, the Gazans will smuggle guns, and this may force us to postpone the big offensive already agreed upon with George W. The Jews prefer to assail weapon-less victims.

The Egyptians also failed Jewish expectations. “I believe Egypt knows what its job is”, said the arrogant Israeli general Ehud Barak. The job he gave to Egypt is the job of jailer of their Palestinian brothers. “The Gazans would never dare to break the siege to Sinai, - wrote Israeli pundits a week, even a day ago - Egyptians will meet them with deadly fire.” When there was a shoot-out, the Israelis were so happy for a while. Effi Eitam, a right-wing religious Jewish leader, who looks like a ‘well-fed kosher pig in yarmulke’(in words of Gilad Atzmon) wrote in the Yediot Ahronot an op-ed dripping of crocodile tears. We Jews are so soft and merciful in comparison to the Egyptians, he wrote. But Mubarak wants to survive, and he knows there are limits he may not push too far. He gave orders to his soldiers to cease fire. The Jews wailed that Egyptians must enforce the border, and supply their pound of flesh per agreement. In vain. Mubarak does not want to follow Anwar as-Sadat to hell.

Deeply dissatisfied, the Jews watched this stream of people that got out of their jail for a short break. But then, they are hard to please, these Jews are. The Palestinians have to kill each other in a civil war, or die of hunger to please the Jews.

My grandfather did that, he died of hunger and exhaustion in 1942 in the ghetto of Stanislaw. The Germans and their Ukrainian quislings did to Jews what the Jews did to Gazans: they gathered them in the ghetto, and left them to starve there. The slogans of the Nazis were also taken from Homerton-Barak’s book, mutatis mutandis: “they must suffer because their leaders are our enemies, they should be punished for their terrorism in the revolution, let them go hungry because their brothers harass the German troops and bomb German cities”. My grandfather Israel – I was named after him – succumbed to hunger, cold and exhaustion, they did not even have to shoot him; he did not qualify for their targeted killing program.

Wait, you’ll say, how could Barak and Olmert starving Gazans in 2008 influence the Germans of 1942? How could they be responsible for death of my granddad? The answer is given in the secret language of Jewish mysticism: Ein mukdam, ein meuhar beTorah. The sequence of events - in the Holy Writ and in the world – is irrelevant, because all events and their alleged consequences take place in the same hyper-time, forever playing vicious circles of Cat-pursuing-Mice-that scared-Elephant-that trampled-the-Cat. Poincare and Einstein translated this concept into the language of modern physics when they described Time as just one of dimensions as bendable as the others.

Douglas Adams popularised this in his novel: his characters go back in time to fix a problem, they do it, but at some cost: they save a fish, but dodo dies out, they gain music of Bach, but lost Coleridge’s poems. The people are not aware that the world already changed; that now they have more of Bach but less of Coleridge. Only those, who could exit the time frame, know: the world is changing all the time because of our deeds, and these changes go “back” and “forth”, because there is no such thing as “back” and “forth”. Thus, the Armenians slaughtered and expelled the Azeris, and their ancestors were deported into desert to suffer in the Kurds’ hands, and the Kurds suffer for this crime, and for their support of the US-Zionist occupation.

And some things have not materialised yet, but they will: when I listen to the Jews (and Poles, and Ukrainians, and Americans) who insist that “Stalin was as bad as Hitler” and “there is no difference between Nazis and Commies” and of “Russian antisemitism”, I know that in the next future, the Red Army will not fight the Germans, will not liberate Poland and Czechia, will not open the gates of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

This world is just, and the Lord is just. He punishes ingratitude by undoing the deed one had to be grateful for.

Do an evil thing today, and the past will change and kick you back. Starve the Gazans and your grandfathers will die of thirst and hunger. Torture Palestinians, and your ancestors will be tortured by the inquisition using the same reasoning you applied today to your enemies. Turn Hebron into a prison for its inhabitants, and the Jews will be slaughtered in 1929. The crime of Jewish mistreatment of Palestinians is being punished even now. Do not ask who is starved and who is tortured: it is somebody quite close to you.